Good morning !

Winning your next hour is a mantra to keep pushing when you think you’re exhausted. But that’s not where it starts or stops. In fact, winning your next hour is the best way to start anything.

Nearly everyone thinks you have to know what you’re doing before starting something new. For example, before starting a business you have to know all the details about your market, the TAM, precise margins, your go-to-market strategy, and have a perfected product or service. And in fact, people spend over $700 billion on college education every year in an attept to gain pre-starting knowledge.

But based on my experiences and research, the best way to prepare is to just start. I saw this in my own life when I started put down a $7,000 non-refundable deposit to rent a building for a single day with no hard plans (or dicsussing with my wife). That single-day rental was the location of the first Caffeine and Kilos Invitational, launching a global brand that sold over $1 million of tee shirts and coffee in the first calendar year.

You see this with the biggest companies in the world in Microsoft (started in a garage) and amazon (first website was atrocious). You even see this in non-business ventures. Ask any first time parent how much of the job has been learned on the fly vs going precisely to plan. For that matter, the explorers of the 15th and 16th centuries loaded up in ships and set sail without any idea of what they’d actually find. Present day America would not exist if they were waiting until they had all the answers. (We don’t have to agree with they’re actions, tactics, and brutality to appreciate their courage of starting the journey.)

As you start, you will hit many roadblocks. You will fail many times while you are learning what works. You will also succeed many times and adjust your plans as you learn skills and insider knowledge. That very same insider knowlege would have left you on the starting blocks if you knew it ahead of time. I’ve heard many successful people say “I would have never started if I knew what I know now about...” Having navigated those difficulties and earned the know-how, they now acknowledge the benefit of not knowing all the challenges. Put in the position to try, they figured it out.

You cannot afford to wait any longer. Uncomfortable as it is, the only way to know what you’re getting into is to start. Waiting until your product is perfect or the timing is right are perfunctory forms of procrastination. The timing will never seem perfect. Your product will always have room for improvement. And the only way to find the gaps in your plan is to launch. This falls in line with the Chinese proverb: The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.

Over the last 15 years, I’ve seen the power in winning your next hour. Through my experiences in business and athletics, I’ve met and became friends with founders of fortune 500 companies, Olympians, and people who have found their version of success many different ways. I’ve experienced and witnessed what it takes to go from the sidelines to success.

If you are happy and comfortable in your current life and have no further aspirations, this is not for you. However, if you want to take your life to the next chapter, next level, or next step then you need to fully understand and buy-in to winning your next hour. Robert Frost wrote “the only way out is through,” but what you need to embrace is the only way in is to begin.

Dreams, goals, aspirations: they are all overwhelming when you’re thinking about the final product. I’m going to provide you with tools you need in order to win. The tips and tricks to discipline. How to achieve on days when you lack motivation. Why waiting unil you’re “good enough” will only lead to failure. How to structure your days and weeks so you have the time to begin. The superpower of friends and roles other people can play. A goal setting plan that takes you from “I don’t know where to start” to “things I didn’t even know that I didn’t know.”

Life is too short for regrets. You need to stop waiting and wishing and calling it living.

Be great,

Danny Lehr

P.S. Next week we'll get back into a story about me fucking up and learning from it...